...And Dreams Are Dreams

Her own wish and desire was that they always remain together. And she would draw strength from him, and sweetness, that would pass through her like lightning, with thunder and rain that would keep getting stronger, then disappear. Then she would transform herself into a money generator. Until finally he started to be afraid. He would hide her. He knew that those who used to exploit her were out looking for her. And while she rarely spoke to him of her past, she led him to understand that it had been traumatic, that she had suffered much because of her ability to make men happy, and that everybody envied her. They would beat her until she dried up and then she would become unhappy. Because her talents remained buried, they would make things worse for her and she would run off, with difficulty, just like that night he had found her in the street, looking for a taxi, with no place to go, in tears. She had just escaped again, with the help of the cleaning lady, from her last prison. But she didn’t want to be imprisoned by him. She wanted to be able to go out, to dance, to laugh, to go to the beach and to restaurants, and not to see the sunlight only through closed shutters.

That’s why they decided to go abroad. Even though the Mafia’s tentacles spread everywhere, tracing them in a foreign country would be difficult. So they left. They lived, free and happy in Düsseldorf, without anyone discovering their secret. He would give her more sweetness than she could bear, and she would return it with more money than he could spend.

“And then what happened?” I asked, as the story was drawing to an end and we were approaching my destination. “The truth is,” he said, turning around for the first time to face me, “that love is an elusive bird.”

“I don’t understand. Can you elaborate?”

“The truth is that suddenly one day she went dry on me. Like the wells in my village. You keep drawing and drawing for water, but there isn’t a drop.”

“And how did it happen? Out of the blue?”

“Completely out of the blue. I had started seeing another woman. A blond German woman, Ursula.

When my girlfriend found out, she didn’t say anything, she didn’t make a scene, but she stopped putting out dollars at night. And one day she left, she disappeared.

I even had Interpol look for her. She was nowhere to be found.” The woman-legend, the woman-liberator, the woman with a capital W, was finished.

“But please tell me,” I said, as I paid my fare.

“There’s something I don’t understand: you told me you had saved up a lot of money. So why are you working as a taxi driver?”

“I didn’t tell you the most important part. When she went dry, all the dollars she had produced and that we had put in the bank also disappeared. I went one day to withdraw the money, and they told me there was no such account.”

“Could she have taken it when she left?”

“No. I had my own separate account. It just seems that… how can I explain it? By losing the absolute of love, I was left with the relativity of passion. Love is an elusive bird.”

I got out of the taxi. The young taxi driver was looking at me intently. Suddenly, I realized how much I resembled him.

“And what was her name?” I asked him.

“Doña Rosita,” he said.

— 3-

The Story of the Immigrant

Who Worked at the Düsseldorf Zoo

Before Coming Back to Athens

and Buying His Own Taxi

“The story I’m going to tell you will seem like a fairy tale. At one time, I was working as a guard at the zoo. There were all kinds of animals there. But Rosa, the young tiger, was different. Born of a tiger-mother and a tiger-father, she began very early to feel stifled by the prison in which she was forced to live. It seems that memories of the freedom of the jungle, transmitted to her genetically through her chromosomes, made her nostalgic for open spaces, the same way babies born at sea will grow up nostalgic for it. From the moment she became aware of her surroundings, in the same cell as her parents, she would involuntarily watch their courting games, which were hindered by lack of space.

She would see her tiger-father’s desire to run and throw himself on her tiger-mother, but he was unable to in the narrow cage. She would see her tiger-mother’s desire to growl with pleasure, but she was unable to because the animals in the neighboring cages would make fun of her, imitating her cries. As for Rosa, the little tiger, she had always wanted to run away — to the jungle where her ancestors had lived happily in the wild — to find the freedom she had in her blood.